News

Probe and directional scanning UI updates

05. March 2017.

Every now and then when you get tired of shooting ships, crunching that asteroid belt or hauling that big cargo from station to station – EVE gives you a perfect way to relax by just going out and exploring the beautiful universe…

EVE’s probe and directional scanner got a fair share of improvements over the years and once you get familiar with the way it works, and with the right set of skills – it really takes just a few seconds to pin down that nice relic site which just sits there waiting for you to hack into.

Luckily the improvements don’t stop here. CCP has announced some new features coming to the probe and directional scanning UI which mostly consist of small tweaks that solve problems capsuleers had with the current one.

Visibility

To increase visibility of the important items, number of items will have their visual intensity reduced (such as spheres in the scene including scan probes and signatures, suns and solar system rings). However, one of the biggest changes being introduced are icons for each specific site in exploration and the display of the corresponding ship icon in combat scanning.

When your scan results are at or above 25%, these icons are going to be displayed. The progress of the scan will also be shown in the actual scene when you scan a specific signature. When you select a signature in the probe scan window, a circle will appear in the solar system map to show which signature is selected and the progress of the scan. Your selection in the probe scanner window will be maintained in the solar system map. Once the scan is complete, the site icons in the scene will animate to their new estimated location.

Probe manipulation

Positioning the probes is a major deal to new capsuleers, especially until they don’t understand how the whole system works. Veteran explorers are already familiar of the “2D” camera rotation where you pull you view on top of the probe to position it on a single plane, and the swap the camera around to position it on the other axis. This will now be doable by double-clicking anywhere in the solar system map. However – this usually causes problems with picking up the scanning cube or selecting the wrong axis arrow by mistake. All these issues are being resolved by removing the arrow pointing towards the camera when you reach a certain angle and making the cube selectable even through multiple layers of other items on your screen.

Probe resizing are also being addressed. There will be a new slider in the probe scanner window, dedicated shortcuts set through the shortcuts tab, or you could just use alt + mouse wheel.

The scanning window

The current scanning window show a lot of useful information but it’s still getting some cool features added. You will still have the options for full screen, dock left, dock right, and floating. With the new changes you will be able to dock the Probe Scanner and Directional Scanner windows within the Solar System map view. You will still be able to open both windows without having the solar system map open.

The middle section has not changed too much, but new icons and the new color states will be implemented. The bottom section will show controls for altering the formation of probes, the size of the probes, and the Analyze button.

As an attempt to improve usability, CCP will be introducing the concept of scanning difficulty. This should hopefully help new players understand why they simply cannot pin down a very difficult site, as well as creating a nice reveal moment that can also help with deciding if it’s worth proceeding with the scan or not as difficulty roughly correlates with the value and risk of the site.

To help new capsuleers even further, new tooltips are being added to the scan window. These will include brief descriptions of the purpose and functionality of the two systems including links to the basic items required to perform either action.